Pictures From Home

Larry Sultan was responsible for two very influential photographic books. The first, Evidence, was created in collaboration with Mike Mandel. The second, Pictures from Home, was published in 1992 and there have been no more editions since then. Mack’s new edition offers a new edit and includes previously unpublished images. It is built around images created in a series of visits to his parents’ home in the 1980s but these are combined with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writings and other memorabilia. It has been especially influential in its melding of documentary and staged elements.

First published in 1992 to wide critical acclaim, Pictures From Home is Larry Sultan’s pendant to his parents. Sultan returned home to Southern California periodically in the 1980s and the decade-long sequence he presents moves between registers, combining contemporary photographs with film stills from home movies, fragments of conversation, Sultan’s own writings and other memorabilia. The result is a narrative collage in which the boundary between the documentary and the staged becomes increasingly porous.

“What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name,” wrote Sultan. “It has more to do with love than with sociology. With being a subject in the drama rather than a witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working, everything shifts: the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the middle of the night, stunned and anguished. These are my parents. From that simple fact, everything follows.”

This new edition – the first released since 1992 – offers a new edit of Sultan’s work and includes previously unpublished images.